Curved Screen Computer Monitor

[Terry Monohan]

This week I treated myself at Best Buy to a 34 inch curved screen computer monitor on sale. I have a few 3D curved screen 55 inch Samsung TV's but this was my first computer screen with a wide curve.

The ACER Nitro ED34OCU unit had very good black levels, color and sharpness. As with most electronic things these days you need to adjust the video menu to turn down the brightness, turn up the color, turn up the sharpness, turn up the Contrast It looks amazing for the price I paid. Has two HDMI inputs and digital ones plus small stereo speakers. At least the Acer has adjustments to the video level as many monitors at a low price you are stuck with just contrast if at that and no speakers. I could turn It into a small bedroom Todd-AO screen buy using my Roku or Blu Ray into the HDMI inputs in the back and a Dolby Surround Bar.

While not one of the new 45 inch LG gaming curved screens with even a bigger deep curve at $1,900 this new Acer 34 inch model gives me a Cinerama effect on the computer at only a few inches away at only $279 I bought two of these as they were $50 off last week.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I bought a 43" LG curved about 5 months ago. After using it for a week, I just didn't care for doing photo editing on it. I returned it for the exact same thing in the flat screen version. Light distribution on both seemed about the same to my light meter, and my eyes from where I sit. No difference in anything else. I don't use mine set up as a dual screen monitor, as I have the matching 16×9 monitor for screen 2.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Yeah I have not adopted the curved screen concept at home yet. Might look good for films, but for everything else i'm just not used to it yet.

My home setup is currently two ThinkVision P32p-20 4K 60htz on a decent arm. I got them quite cheap on ebay because they didn't come with a stand. (200$ each). They are probably a few generations old now, but still sold by Lenovo.

Only 60htz (I don't really game)
Avg. Delta E<2, 99% sRGB, 99% BT.709, 90% DCI-P3
(usb-c, hdmi, DP plus a built in Nic and KVM)

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/acces...nal/62a2gar2us

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Ryan, agreed! A curved monitor is great to watch a movie on. Just not so great for the Panorama type photography I like to do. The resultant Metal or Glass wall hangings I have made, are obviously, also flat.

[Terry Monohan]

Just in one week the price of the super 45 inch curved LG gaming TV went from $1,699 to $1,000 at Best Buy. The price seems to go up and down. The cheap great 34 inch curved computer Acer model I bought last week I am enjoying looking at so far. Some You Tube content can be in the 20.1 view image scope size.

When I went to my local Best Buy store to look for and buy the the Nitro 34 inch Acer curved screen they had advertised on line there were none on display or on the floor as a sample to look at. Even as they said this store had them in stock.

When I asked one of the three lame sales guys in the computer screen booth he tells me curved screen monitors are not that in favor these days and they just keep them in the back storage area. He went and got a brand new one sealed in the box. I was so relieved they did not try to sell me a open box/sample display or returned one.

I'd rather go to a store and buy a TV in person. You go on line and see all the bad reviews of people buying computer or large TV's by the mail and the screen arrives broken. That Is from a brand new dealer. I have heard horror stories from some of my friends that have gone on E Bay and purchased used large TV screens that come with free shipping and the sellers did not keep the foam original box and they ship them not double boxed and just use what they can find and don't bother to even put fragile on the cardboard. Good luck on trying to send back when the screen is cracked or the plastic broken.

BB had the nice new expensive LG curved gaming screens on display they were selling even sold one of them while I was waiting for the guy to come out from the back vault warehouse with my new Acer after waiting over10 minutes.

I know stores are limited in space to keep everything out on display but I bet If they had the on sale Nitro Acer 34 curved monitor on display people would still buy them. BB is now selling electric bikes and they take up more space. Same with DVD's no longer carried at BB. Many times in the last month I would hang out in the front of a BB store waiting for friends to park and people come in and ask were are the DVD's located and the guard tells them BB does not sell them anymore. They walk out of the store. Lost sales maybe for something else to buy while looking at the DVD section that they no longer carry.

My friend Jim the projectionist here on FF hates curved screens. Like some people do but I still like enjoying going out to a movie theatre that has a large curved huge screen with the proper masking and a kick ass stereo surround sound. . Now I have a baby CinemaScope wide computer monitor for my personal computer viewing pleasure at home.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I have noticed much the same thing with the pricing. You see it one day, then go to the store the next, and it's back at regular price. Although the store I went to had the 34" curved screen in stock, they had to ship the flat screen monitor to me. But they were somewhere close buy as Best Buy delivered it to me in their own truck the next morning. I loved curved screens for cinema. It can and often does improve light distribution, as well as focus at the sides. I did keep my original box as gargantuan as it is...

[Ryan Gallagher]

For a brief period I had a couple 55" TVLogic reference displays stored at home, with the intent to resell them. But I did set one up for a few months and enjoy movies on them. Even at 1080p with no OLED or Local dimming, the color accuracy was night and day.

I wish I had grown up near a curved screen cinema. Other than a handful of IMAX experiences, not sure I ever had the pleasure back when they were more common.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Since I needed more space for all the junk on my desktop and color correctness was no longer important, I switched to a 55" 8K Samsung TV as my primary "monitor". I used to have to separate 4K panels and two FHD+ monitors, but that setup became too cumbersome. Now, with one giant screen in front of my face, I have sufficient screen real-estate to put everything on the desktop that needs to be there...

I'm not advocating this setup for anybody else though, it needs some time to get used to and you also need hardware that's capable of driving 8K screens.

I used to have an OLED monitor a while back, but since that got burned in pretty quickly, I abandoned the idea of using OLED for computer screens ever since.

[Leo Enticknap]

Last year Amazon had a Black Friday offer for this thing at $200. We have a PC in a corner of the dining room that I use for checking emails between getting up and hitting the road, and my son uses to do his homework with and play games on afterwards in the afternoon. Its monitor (a no-name one bought in 2005 and which, miraculously, survived being shipped from England - on an actual ship! - when I emigrated) was starting to fail, and so I bought it. Out of curiosity as to what the experience would be like, I did watch one 'scope movie (Sink the Bismarck) on it shortly after installing it, and found it to be surprisingly immersive. The combination of sitting so close to the display and its slight curve helping the wide image to fill my field of vision made for quite a pleasing effect. However, spending the better part of two hours upright on an office chair is not my idea of movie viewing fun, and it was only the fact that the audio was mono and Academy curve that made the lo-fi built-in speakers not a problem. Still, it appears that we got a bargain, given that the same model is still on sale, and for $135 more than I paid for it.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Ha! Sink the Bismark... My dad's favorite war movie. I almost know the script by heart... Fyyah!.... Shooot! Well there she goes...

[Jim Cassedy]

Good friend Terry and I are polar opposites when it comes to our opinions on curved
screens, for reasons I won't rant about right now. But I thought y'all would enjoy this
cartoon from an early 1950's issue of 'International Projectionist", when bigger, and
curve-ier screens were something of a 'fad':
BigScreen.jpg